KNotations

Please note that we have had to put the date back to Friday June 9.

We have been extremely busy improving, testing and just plain using KNotes... though we have not been doing a very good job of blogging about it :o)

We've been hammering out many new features in several areas: collaboration / social software / community building / profiling and portfolios. Many of those features are not yet being used in our production version, but over the next months expect to see an increasing number of special-purpose blogging scenarios and features in our portals.

Our public, mature version of KNotes is about to take a small leap forward as well. We are almost finished preparing and testing a new public beta - 0.85. The tarball will be available here by Monday. SourceForge's site has been having a lot of problems lately, so we're not sure when the CVS version will be updated; please use the tarballs released here for the time being.

I'll try to document some of the new features in this weblog. If you have any questions please feel free to email me -- mike AT theknownet DOT com

Sometime in the next week, I'll also - finally! - be announcing KNotes within Plone.org. Many apologies to the hard-working Plonistas who've had to nag me to get round to this; our procrastination has been in part down to wanting to make the documentation more complete and the skin-ability more thoroughgoing :o}

I plan to work hard over the next 10 days on roadmap documentation. We'll also be starting either mailing lists or special blog_forums for users, administrators and developers, and sometime this summer knotes.net will at last get the facelift it needs.

KNotes can be a very powerful and user-pleasing addition to a Plone portal. Knotes + Plone makes a great platform for experimenting with educational or other applications which combine weblogging with social software and/or other functionalities. If you would like to try making use of KNotes, please let us know how you get on. If you feel you can help with development, documentation, or best-practice illustration, we'd really love to hear from you!

I've been quiet here for far too long - apologies.

It's not that we have been idle, though. We've been hammering very hard at knotes, working out a large number of fundamental improvements in response to real-world users' detailed comments and requests.

Yesterday I posted most of the changes to our production server's version of knotes. It all seems to be working very well., For instance, you may notice that the appearance of this weblog has changed ~(it is now getting 100% default knotes styling, so you can see what that looks like.

Over the next week or two we'll be tidying the product, adding documentation, and working towards a proper release of knotes. We're also, alkready, starting to do with knotes what we feel it is intended for --- adapt it for special kinds of collaborative activity, such as professional development planning.

I'll be posting here frequently for a while with updates and explanations. Sorry, but thiss post has to be short.

We have not yet percolated the changes to the CVS version. We'll be doing so over the next week. Please let me know by email if you want to try installing our own working version of knotes before then.

I've been meaning to do something about providing a sandbox in which guests cvan try usinhg and managing KNotes for themselves. We've finally done it!

We have owned the knotes.net domain for some time, intending that it becomes the centre for hosting and discussing KNotes development and releases. There is now a sandbox for KNotes there. If you join the knotes site, you can create and manage KNotes weblogs and discussion items in your home folder. On request, we can make a folder in the sandbox area for you, so you can also try knownet's indexFolder context for plone content. (We will at some time make indexFolder the default for a member folder in this site, but that requires a bit of work :o)

Making the knotes.net site ready for using KNotes was informative about a few remaining installer issues:

ZAAPlugins required

The ZAAPlugins product must be installed in order for attachments to work in blog entries and discussion items

[temporary] main_template hack for nowrap editing

I still have not propagated the changes entailed by the plone-skins-cookie technique for delivering 'unwrapped' plone content/forms. Until I do - sometime next week - it is necessary to have a simple customisation of main_template

Default style for weblogs expects a banner image

Another long-pending little to-do: When Knotes is installed, the default style expects a banner image which is missing from the distribution. Making a knotes_banner.jpg and placing it in your portal_skins/custom folder corrects this. I'll have to think about how best to tackle this problem - we're planning to have a good long look at improving skinnability soon. -- UPDATE - I made a 'base banner' and added it to the skin folder for the weblog type..